Zaeed: That's A Lot Of Guddamn Fire

Here is how much I love all of you: I am walking to Wal-Mart later (or possibly Best Buy, I need to check and see what I've got gift cards for) and I am buying Paragon Lost, and I am watching it this evening.

And my husband's like, "Why the hell would you do that? It's going to be bad, you know it is."

And my one word reply of "MSPixel" was all he needed to know, solid proof that I'd lost my mind.

Speaking of shitty things, let's get to today's MSPixel! I get to be late today, because Christmas. That's all you need to know.

Hey, Dr. Chawkwas! I bet you have a great Christmas cookie recipe, care to tell us?

Some nerd out there's going to be all, "NUH UH IT'S BRANDY." Hush, you. In this house, it is bourbon.

The only real personal detail we ever learn about Dr. Chawkwas is that the lady is a champion drinker. I would be too if I had to sew Garrus' face on and ... I mean, hell. Tali. How would you even doctor on her?

So Zaeed needs some help, let's do that. Before he was hired by Cerberus, he was hired to go liberate an oil refinery. Okay, rad, let's land on that planet and --

Zaeed recognizes the voice.

because hahahahaha fuck batarians

I LOVE bringing Garrus on this mission specifically for this next part.

Anyway, let's roll up the oil refinery. Hey, Zaeed, see anyone you know?

Zaeed shoots some tanks behind the Blue Suns and causes an explosion. I'm pretty sure science doesn't work like that, but we're also pretending there are blue ladies and mass effects running around, so maybe we won't worry about hard science right now.

Then, he starts wailing on one of the pipes:

Hey, Zaeed, why are you doing that?

... I ... I don't think pipes do that, honey.

Well, let's see, there's a paragon interrupt right here, maybe Shepard will close off --

OR THAT GOD DAMN.

I know 'paragon' isn't always 'good', but I'm not sure it's 'face punching' either.

Uh, so let's go deeper into the refinery, after the Blue Suns.

You can choose to help Zaeed and go after his buddy, but the workers will die. I'm trying to run a theme here, so I always help the workers ... besides, why would you let them immolate? Seems kind of mean. ... this is why I've never played through as a renegade.

To help the workers, Shepard has to go through the refinery and activate some consoles so that the sprinkler system will trip and put the fire out. Not sure why it doesn't trip when, you know, THERE'S A DAMN FIRE, and why we're squirting water on an oil fire, but no one asked me.

Anyway, once that's over, we get to the helipad and --

Oops. Can't have it both ways, I guess.

That would be a hot clip falling from Zaeed's gun. I bet that has no repercussions whatsoever in the middle of a big oily building.

A beam falls on Zaeed. Sorry, he's stuck, and will very likely die there.

... unless, like me, you've got your paragon jacked super high from all that Miranda/Jack nonsense, then you can just blue option him out.

PS, Bioware, what a bitch move, letting a $10 DLC character die like that! I like it!

Girlfran been doin' her deadlifts. Good on you. Good on you.

Hey! Pretentious asshole analysis moment: Zaeed and Garrus' missions are both similar (hey let's go kill this guy/nooooo i'm a paragon). Garrus is meant to represent this idea of a renegade who's not a bad guy, just ... we'll say efficient. If you'll remember, Scout Master Mac Walters wanted to replace Garrus with Zaeed, because Mr. Walters is very pro human, so it makes sense that Zaeed's story mirrors Garrus'. The only difference is that you can argue that Zaeed doesn't always make a moral choice (he would have let the workers die, for example). Garrus can make moral choices, but he doesn't weigh out the cost/benefits like a paragon would. (He would have caught and killed Dr. Saleon, for example, but would have killed civilians to do it.)

It's also worth noting that in both stories, the idea of a paragon and renegade are in total opposition to each other. There's probably a story in Mass Effect where they're not, but I can't think of it off the top of my head.

I don't think they went this far with Tali, who's technically Garrus' opposite. They certainly didn't go this far with Kasumi, who's arguably a renegade, since she's a 'master thief'. (Fastest route to get what she wants, damn the concequences of whoever she stole it from.)

Ballsack. Enough of this. NEXT TIME: Let's go back to alien sex.

Garrus: A Variety Of Things Get Shot In This Post

Last time on MSPixel! We were just in the middle of killing Sidonis, weren't we?

Right, I'm pretty sure Shepard and Garrus found him.

I LOVE how turians dress. They have these big tunics that have no less than three hugely loud colors all over them. Garrus has one too, he's just mostly in his armor so we don't usually get to see it. Boo.

cause you gonna die

Shepard actually does something really neat here: if you pick the paragon option, she puts herself in Garrus' scope.

Shepard doesn't get a lot of really cool character moments (particularly in ME1 and 2, she gets a bit more in 3), because she's the player controlled character and we're supposed to fill that shit in ourselves. This is a neat bit of autonomy on her part, though: she knows Garrus won't shoot her, so she can jump in the scope and talk to Garrus all day long if she wants. She trusts him that much. I would argue that she'd only feel that way about any of her old ME1 crew versus the shiny new Cerberus peeps, but that's open to interpretation.

So, Sidonis escapes.

Hey, that's like the third sniper we've encountered that no one gave any fucks about just sitting out there in the open in a major metropolitan area, isn't it! What the hell!

Garrus' loyalty mission is weird, because it's the only one you can technically fail (by letting Sidonis live instead of die) and still keep the character's loyalty. All the other ones require you to not fuck up to some degree. This is possibly a carryover from ME1, where Shepard was set up as Garrus' mentor, and he'd trust teacher enough to know that he made the right decision in letting Sidonis live. I guess. Who knows what the big lizard bastard is thinking, should we ask him?

He has a point, though, you should always go talk to a character after a loyalty mission. They have new dialog! Hopefully they don't get in a fight with another character like Miranda and Jack did. Hey, let's go to the main battery.

You know what? You've read this long enough. You fill in the blank. This is Mass Effect, how do you think Garrus says turians prepare?

What? No! This is Mass Effect, damnit, there aren't any mass effects! Try again.

Hey, closer! Good on you, but not right. Come on, what is this game comprised entirely of?

THERE'S a good hoss. Fucking and fighting. Oh turians. For all that hard work, Garrus rewards Shepard with a story about this one time when he got his dick wet.

Shepard, of course, responds in an appropriate fashion as dictated to her by the rank and prestige bestowed upon her by the Alliance Navy.

Oh I'm doing this.

Y'all hush. This is a Bioware game, we've got to fuck someone. Also, this is a scifi story, so it has to be an alien. Yes it does. I already tried Jacob and got skeeved out, damnit, I'm out of options!

I'm going to spare you my ~shipping manefesto~ and all of my ~tumblr feels~ or whatever the fuck, and just put this forth: I like doing Garrus' romance path best because it is the least creepiest. Pretty much all the other ones have at least one scene that makes me feel like I should go at my skin with a potato peeler. Garrus' is just a lady and a fucked up cricket thing trying to figure out how their genitalia fit together, it's not too bad. There's one more ME2 character that's a love interest that I don't mind, but ... we'll talk about him later. There's a character in ME3 that I would have taken if they'd put said character in ME1 to begin with, but we'll talk about that later too.

Garrus' path arguably has the better story, and if anyone's forgotten, that's what I'm sitting around drawing, so if I've got a chance to make shit easy on me, you bet I'm going to do it with some alien wang in my face.

Also, you all heard me: fucking the big pineapple bird thing is the least creepy path through Mass Effect.

... please don't come at me for not doing your favorite guy!

Err. Anyway, the exact line isn't, "We should fuck!", but it may as well be, since Shepard is JUST ABOUT that subtle about how she wants to gargle his balls.

And Garrus is JUST ABOUT that dense about getting his balls gargled. I'm not sure how you got laid the first time, son!

Hi, this is what I do with my time, I draw people drawing porn.

NEXT TIME: I'm trying to find a mission with less alien sex, but see, I'm starting to run low on those.